CE 100 Index Gains 3.1% as Communications Stock Surge Is Led by Snap 

The CE 100 Index gained 3.1% coming off a Thanksgiving holiday-truncated week with vigor as all segments gained ground.

The Communications pillar surged 8.7%.  

Snap was 12.9% higher in the week, leading the pack on the communications-related names. As reported last week,  Snapchat is becoming the latest to test ad-free subscriptions to drive recurring revenue. The company’s new ad-free tier in Australia costs nearly three times as much as its standard Snapchat+ offering. The move comes as part of Snapchat’s broader push to try out new subscription options, we noted.

Shoppers Embrace BNPL 

Elsewhere, Affirm jumped 43.5% in a week that saw positive media reports that, per Adobe research, BNPL transactions saw $760 million in online spending through the Black Friday weekend, a 20% gain from last year. Cyber Monday’s BNPL use in the U.S. was up 42%.

The Shopping pillar was 6.1% higher. In that segment, PDD gained 22.4%. Though the earnings season has largely passed, PDD noted third-quarter results that showed revenues surged about 94% year on year to roughly $9.4 billion USD. Temu, which launched in the U.S. during the third quarter of last year, had 42 million unique monthly visitors this past October, up 4x from last year. As noted here, only 4.5% of these visits resulted in actual transactions.

LendingClub helped buoy the banking pillar, which was 7.5% ahead in the week.

Shares were up more than 20%. As reported earlier in the month, LendingClub has crossed the $1 billion mark in personal loans sold through its Structured Loan Certificates Program (SLCLC Program) since the launch of that program in April.

The company expects to double this volume to $2 billion over the next six months as it continues to scale, LendingClub said. The SLCLC Program, a two-tranche private securitization, allows LendingClub to retain the senior note while selling the residual certificate on a pool of loans to marketplace investors at a predetermined price, according to the company’s announcement.

WeWork, as has been the case over the past several weeks, has been, in a nutshell, volatile. The company’s stock plunged 55.2% in a week where The Wall Street Journal reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission charged real estate investor Jonathan Larmore on Wednesday with stock manipulation tied to a false tender offer for the company, which went bankrupt last month. Larmore and an entity he controlled, Cole Capital Funds, as the Journal reported, issued a press release saying the firm would purchase 51% of all minority ownership shares in WeWork for $9 a share.

iRobot slipped 11.3%, as the European Commission informed Amazon concerns that the $1.7 billion deal to buy the company may hamper competition. The EU informed Amazon of its preliminary view that its proposed acquisition of iRobot may restrict competition in the market for robot vacuum cleaners.  

Among the objections, as noted by the Commission: “Amazon may have the ability and the incentive to foreclose iRobot’s rivals by engaging in several foreclosing strategies aimed at preventing rivals from selling RVCs on Amazon’s online marketplace and/or at degrading their access to it…Amazon may have the incentive to foreclose iRobot’s rivals because it may be economically profitable to do so.”